Hopelessness is everywhere.  I am seeing it in marriages, in children, in families.  We have given up.  We have given over our power to hopelessness.  And because we feel hopeless, we stop fighting.  We stop moving forward.  We stop living.

This was me too.

I gave up hope.  I gave up fighting.  I allowed myself to become disabled.  I just stopped.  Life kept moving around me but everything in me went on pause.  And as we all know, you cannot pause for long without moving one direction or another….and I slid….into the deepest pit I can imagine.  I gave up.  For a long time.  I gave up tending to my marriage.  I gave up praying for my husband and my children.  I handed over my future to my hopelessness.  And they all slid with me. For Two. Whole. Years.  We dove into the depths.

And then something happened.

God shook me to my core.  He allowed something to happen that I never dreamed would happen to me.  The circumstance came to my attention suddenly but my wake up wasn’t a lightening bolt or an earthquake.  It came slowly. Over many, many months.  Hope began to rise deep in my chest.  Where there was no life, something began to grow in the vacancy.

And now I cannot be stopped.

The enemy has taken enough ground.  I stood by while he attempted to devour my marriage and my family.  I forgot the promises The Lord has spoken over my life.  I put my head down and trudged along the ground because life just plain got hard. It took my attention.  It overtook me and I bent to its heaviness.

But now I rise.

NOW I RISE.

And now, he knows my name.

And he is afraid of me.

Because I am finding a power that I have been told my whole life exists.  I have loved Jesus more than half of my life.  I have known that He is love and kindness and justice and power.  But you see, I have only really comprehended the love and kindness part.  I could not find the justice and power part.  That was always for someone else.  I would look for other people that could pray it for me.  I just couldn’t make it happen in my own life.  And it was because of fear.  What I never saw was that I was afraid to feel His power, or any power at all for that matter.  I always saw power as something arrogant or self serving.  People used power to control other people.  To make them smaller.  To bully.  To get their way. I associated power with anger.  Anger is powerful.  It is intimidating.  It can be paralyzing.  This was my definition of power.

And then God began this process in my life….nearly a year ago.  He is wiping every fear I have away.  He is healing broken places that I knew were there but couldn’t overcome on my own and even more wounds that I never knew existed.  He is taking my fear and failures and turning them into passion and power.  Passion for broken homes and broken families.  Passion for my husband and children that I have never felt.  Power over the darkness and destruction of the enemy.  Power over every single attack from the enemy on my heart, over my past failures, over my family.

He will not win.

I see him and I know what he is up to. He has been doing it since the beginning of time and I stand up right now on behalf of my family, your family, my marriage and yours, and I say NO.  Your access has been denied.  You are finished.  You are seen and known and you will go back from where you came.  The end of your POWER is here.  The POWER of the ALMIGHTY GOD  is at hand.  And HE lives in me!!